Meeting the Enemy: the Human Face of the Great War by Richard van Emden

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British POWs hide their desperation for a prisoner exchange behind gallows humour

Richard Kemp

Published at 12:01AM, August 31 2013

This tour de force of research casts new light on meetings between the British and Germans in the First World War

As Guardsman Norman Cliff passed two decomposing bodies on the Western Front he was overcome by conflicting emotions. Two soldiers, one German, the other British, lay hand in hand “as though reconciled in mutual agony and in the peace of death”.

This grim yet deeply moving scene evokes Wilfred Owen’s great poem Strange Meeting, written shortly before he was killed in action in 1918. One line, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”, sums up the often paradoxical relationship between deadly enemies on the Western Front which is the central theme of this book. Despite industrialised carnage, fighting men